A great deal of research and development money has been spent by the electronic industry to produce a satisfactory optical character recognition device which is capable of identifying the characters produced in conventional printing styles, thus eliminating the requirement that the characters be specifically malformed in order to permit electronic recognition thereof either by magnetic ink and sensing devices or by optical sensing and identification circuitry. Such systems are commonly in use by banks for identifying preprinted checking account numbers and by other industries for rapidly handling preprinted and coded items, such as coupons, labels and the like. In addition to such limited use of equipment, there are a number of OCR devices which purport to read conventional printed characters, but do so at only relatively slow speeds and with considerable inaccuracy, and in a manner entirely different from the manner embodied in this invention.
This invention embodies the use of a television camera scanning unit which permits successive scanning of the characters to be identified and permits the sensing of the identifying characteristics required for accurate and positive identification at extremely high speeds on the order of 66,000 characters per second, as compared with devices presently on the market operating at between 500 and 3,000 characters per second. Further, this invention is more compact and inexpensive than other OCR machines presently on the market.
The high speed capabilities of this invention are attributable to the asynchronous design of the logic circuitry and to the manner of storage of the scanned character identifying characteristics which enables the television camera to continuously scan the input material without having to stop after every character, as is the requirement of some OCR machines.
Other advantages of this invention include the capability of accurately recognizing characters which are too large to totally fit into the scanning area and the capability of automatically correcting any mispositioning of the scanned character in the scanning area.